titleWhen looking at video cards it’s not always just the price and performance that are things to consider. Depending on your situation, noise, power usage, height and width of the card all have to be taken into consideration. A good example of this would be a low profile HTPC case, you of course will want the best performance but if it requires extra power connectors it may not work. In some cases you don’t have room for a dual PCI slot card or you need a low profile card. Those are all examples of where Sapphires newest card the HD 6670 Low Profile would come in handy. As a single width, low profile capable card it can fit in almost any situation, even better it doesn’t require any extra power connections. The question is how will it perform, lets find out. 

Product Name: Sapphire HD 6670 Low Profile Edition

Review Sample Provided by: Sapphire

Review by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

Specifications

Output

1 x D-Sub(VGA)
1 x Dual-Link DVI
1 x HDMI 1.4a

GPU

800 MHz Core Clock
40 nm Chip
480 x Stream Processors

Memory

1024 MB Size
128 -bit GDDR5
4000 MHz Effective

Dimension

190(L)x62(W)x23(H) mm mm Size.

Software

Driver CD

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Packaging

Let’s be honest, looking at the packaging for the HD 6670 Low Profile there is no difference between the packaging for this model and the standard model. This is a little odd considering Sapphires normal desire to show off different models, with this model being an exclusive model you would think it would have special packaging. Having said that, the packaging is still attractive; it also follows Sapphires standard style and look.

Inside there is a second cardboard box with the card and all of the accessories in a recycled paper tray.  With the card being so small it almost looks like you have nothing in the package when you look in. Other than the card itself you have your installation guide, a guide on HyperMemory support for Windows 7 and Vista, your driver CD, and a standard height bracket. The card is wrapped up in a bubble wrap bag that doubles as a static resistant bag.

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Board Layout

Like I mentioned before, they really packed everything into a small package. As you can see in the picture below the low profile height and single bay width make for an unintimidating card. Even more impressive is the lack of any power connector on the card.

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Here is a similar photo but with the standard height bracket installed.

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The short cooling solution consist of a black cooler with the Sapphire logo embossed and an equally small fan to match the cooling and keep everything cool.

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A green PCB houses the HD 6670. Sapphire did a good job packing everything into the low profile solution, the PCB is packed everywhere you look.

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When running the low profile brackets, to have the VGA connection on the back of your PC you will have to take up two slots. This is optional of course. You still have a DVI and HDMI connection. As a whole its great to see all three connections on a card like this. HDMI and VGA are a requirement when considering use as an HTPC and DVI has become fairly standard with most monitors.

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Our Test Rig

Intel i7-3960X
Asus Rampage IV X79 Motherboard
Kingston 1600Mhz DDR3 Quad Channel Ram

Kingston Hyper X 120
Seagate Constellation 2tb Hard drive
Intel Water Cooling
Cooler Master Gold Series 1200 Watt PSU
http://www.highspeedpc.com/ Test Bench

 


Our Testing Procedures

All of our in game performance testing was run at 1920x1080, you can see the exact settings below. Here are the details for each of our tests.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 (1920x1080 – high settings, first scene starting after the cut scene, recorded using fraps)

Dirt 2 (1920x1080 – 4x MSAA – high settings, in-game benchmark)

Dirt 3 (192x1080 - 4xMSAA - high settings, in-game benchmark)

Metro 2033 DX11 (built-in benchmark, 1920 x 1080; DirectX: DirectX 11; Quality: Very High; Antialiasing: MSAA 4X; Texture filtering: AF 4X; Advanced PhysX: Enabled; Tessellation: Enabled; DOF: Disabled)

Metro 2033 DX10 (built-in benchmark, 1920 x 1080; DirectX: DirectX 10; Quality: Very High; Antialiasing: MSAA 4X; Texture filtering: AF 4X; Advanced PhysX: Enabled; Tessellation: Enabled; DOF: Disabled)

Total War: Shogun 2 Direct X11 Benchmark High setting

Synthetic Benchmarks For video cards our synthetic benchmarks are limited to 3DMark Vantage and 3DMark Vantage 2011. 3DMark Vantage is run with PPU turned off with results from both the performance and high settings. In 3DMark Vantage 2011 we run both performance and extreme benchmarks

 


3DMark

For our synthetic benchmark results we have run the HD 6670 LP through both 3DMark Vantage and 3DMark 11. For each of those benchmark we ran the performance and High/Extreme tests. Although the card came in at the bottom of our results, you have to remember that this card is only taking up a single slot at half height. When you remember that, the fact that it’s near the performance of the GTS450 is impressive.

3dmarkvantage-perfwm

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3dmark11-perfwm

3dmark11-extremewm

 


Battlefield Bad Company 2

With the settings turned up and running at 1920x1080 the in game performance on the HD6670 was “playable” but not what I would recommend. At 25 FPS the results aren’t far behind the GTS450 and are slightly ahead of our original HD6670 results. With a few small adjustments to the settings or if you were running on a lower resolution monitor you wouldn’t have any trouble at all.

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Metro 2033

Our Metro 2033 results are not intended to give a perfect representation of the in game performance you would see. For these tests in both Direct X10 and 11 we run with everything turned all the way up including AA. Even the fastest cards we test barely reach what I would consider playable numbers. What this does is give us a great platform to compare results on today’s video cards along with cards in the future without having to worry about being CPU limited as quickly.  Our HD6670 LP results come in at same as our previous results with it outscoring the original HD 6670 and just below the GTS 450 in DX10 and. In DX11 it doesn’t outperform the original but comes even closer to that GTS 450.  

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metro2033dx10wm

 


Total War: Shogun 2

Most of our other results have the HD 6670 LP very close to what we saw with the original. In Total War: Shogun 2 our results for the Low Profile Edition were almost spot on with our GTS 450 results. At 16 FPS it’s obvious that you wouldn’t want to run Shogun 2 on high settings in 1920x1080, but on lower settings or a lower resolution you will be seeing playable frame rates without a problem.

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Dirt 2 and 3

We have included both Dirt 2 and Dirt 3 results for Minimum and Average FPS. Average FPS is important, but the minimum FPS is going to be what gives you the impression of smoothness. Although at the bottom of our results the HD6670 LP still managed to get almost 35 FPS on each, to some this is a perfectly good playable frame rate. I myself would turn the settings down to medium and enjoy top not performance out of a card that takes up less than ¼ of the room of the other cards.

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Noise and Cooling

By packing the entire video card into a shorter design there is a good chance that they have added to the heat output on the HD6670, to add to that the smaller heatsink size gives them less potential cooling power. Because of that when it came to checking out the cards cooling performance and noise I was a little concerned. As it turns out my concerns were not needed, the HD 6670 LP stays reasonably cool even when being put under load. With good cooling in a small package there is always a chance that they increased the RPM of the fan on the heatsink to help with its performance but I was impressed with the noise output of the card as a whole. In fact I had to turn off the other fans on our test bench to even hear it at all.

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Overall and FV

So at the end of the day what do we have? Sapphire managed to pack an entire HD 6670 into a half high single slot wide video card. This is without a doubt the best performing card we have seen in this form factor. Even better is the lack of an external power connection meaning this card runs fully off of the PCI Express slot. That means you won’t have any problem packing this into any PC or HTPC of any size or shape as long as it has a PCI Express x16 slot on it. With the HD 6670 Low Profile you will be able to game at mid-level settings on some of the top performing games and even on high settings on a few others. This isn’t for high end gaming, but you could easily turn an HTPC into a secret gaming machine and play a few games on your big screen. Sapphire really has a gem with this card, it’s a fairly nitch market but no one else has anything close to it.

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Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #21469 08 Dec 2011 20:23
A new card from Sapphire that has a little power behind it, but will fit in a low profile case.

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